Inventors:
William Brooks Barrett - South Boston MA, US
Lee R. Taylor - Boulder CO, US
International Classification:
G06F 12/02
Abstract:
Methods of using FLASH memory to emulate EEROM are disclosed. The present method uses two pages of FLASH memory, where each page is one or more separately erasable blocks. One page is referred to as the current page, while the other is the next page. Tokens, which are data structures containing a data element, are written in successive locations in the current page. When the current page is nearly completely filled, the write operation starts writing the new tokens to the next page. In some embodiments, to equalize the execution time of the write routine, the write routine also copies one token from the current page to the next page after a new token is written to the next page. Once all tokens have been copied to the next page, the current page can be erased. At this point, the next page becomes the current page.